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ButtonMasher: DIY video game tools put you in control

Buttonmasher is our monthly column about video games, and how the way we play is changing

(Image: Etienne Laurent/ISART)

By Douglas Heaven

Hmm, what will I make today?

EVERYONE has a book in them – or so the saying goes. Could there be a video game in there too? We might soon find out. Project Spark – a game for the Xbox One and Windows 8 PCs, which Microsoft showed off at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, last week – will provide a digital playpen in which gamers can get together to create and share games of their own.

Project Spark is just the highest profile product in a host of tools that are fuelling the ambitions of a new breed of passionate players who want to make the leap from merely participating to designing the worlds they play in.

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Far from being hardcore programmers, these gamers tend to be amateurs who come to the table with very little experience of writing computer code.

Tools such as Game Maker, Flixel, RPG Maker and Twine – a tool for making interactive fiction – now let budding developers start making games by dragging objects about in a graphical interface or simply by writing text.

“The barrier to entry for game development has been demolished,” says games developer Christer Kaitila. “These are exciting times for an emerging art – the gates have been flung wide open.”

Though it started as a niche hobby, DIY game design is set to go mainstream. Microsoft’s Project Spark aims to turn the making of games itself into a game. Players are given a fully configurable world that can be moulded with gestures recognised by Kinect – mountains are sculpted and valleys scooped out with a swipe of the hand. Buildings, characters and objects of almost any kind can be added via graphical interfaces.

Once it is all in place, users can devise simple scripts that give their creations programmed behaviours. One demo of the game showed how a rock, for example, could be turned into a faithful sidekick by adding a few short commands.

Early testers have already created a wide variety of games, from block-matching puzzle games to side-scrollers, top-down shooters, and 3D first-person adventures – many of them recreations of existing games. Project Spark makes this level of creativity accessible by hiding hundreds of lines of code beneath the interfaces that are second nature to gamers.

“Spark makes this creativity accessible by hiding hundreds of lines of code under familiar interfaces”

Game Maker, a tool for creating games on the PC, has been used to make several successful titles, including Spelunky, Hotline Miami and Gunpoint. “Game Maker is great because it’s good for beginners,” says Tom Francis, who used the tool to make Gunpoint. “But it doesn’t keep you a beginner.” When Francis started making the game he was working as a games journalist and had no programming experience. What he likes about Game Maker is how it lets you move from sketching out the basics of a game in a drag-and-drop interface to adding in blocks of code bit by bit, as you learn. “It’s a great way to ramp up,” he says.

Francis released Gunpoint earlier this year as a digital download. He jokes that it recouped the development costs – the $30 licence he bought for Game Maker – almost instantly as he sold his game for around $10. Sales took off from there and he quit his job to concentrate on making games.

“I certainly think anyone can make a game if they want to, but they have to want to,” says Mike Kasprzak, one of the main organisers of Ludum Dare – a “game jam” where thousands of people get together to make games over a weekend. Ludum Dare has been held in the UK three times a year since 2002 and the number of people taking part each time has grown considerably. At the April event this year over 2300 games were made, and Kasprzak expects the final tally from the latest jam, held from 23 to 26 Aug, to be even higher. The great benefit of game jams is that they motivate people, says Francis. “They’re a kick in the pants,” he says.

Game jams also snowball, says games developer Sophie Houlden. “People will play these games and hear they were made by somebody not dissimilar to them and will think about taking part in the next jam.”

Sharing online plays a big part in how the DIY ethic spreads. Houlden thinks we will soon see the gaming equivalent of YouTube or DeviantArt. The heavy hitters are already on board: Sony and Microsoft have made sure that their new consoles will let amateur games developers self-publish.

Tools and game jams are also giving gamers a creative outlet that they might not otherwise have had. “There is now a large group of under-represented people expressing themselves through games,” says Mike Treanor, who studies video game design at the University of California in Santa Cruz. But though the tools are still improving, none is yet to game-making what the pen and paper or the keyboard is to writing. Treanor points out that they still force amateur developers to shoehorn creative expression into a certain form. The most easy-to-use tools tend to support only 2D games, for example. “More than limiting the types of games people end up making, this limits the types of games that people can even conceive of making,” he says. “We are still figuring out how to express ourselves with games.”

AI can play that game, too

Game-making tools can help designers who don’t know how to code, But all the ideas still need to come from a person. Could future tools help with that too?

Michael Cook at Goldsmiths, University of London, has designed an AI called Angelina to design game levels automatically, find novel gameplay mechanics and select art that fits a given theme.

Julian Togelius at the IT University of Copenhagen in Denmark and colleagues have built a similar AI that collaborates with people. It devises new types of card game and presents candidates to a human. “It’s a chance for games to become as common a medium of expression as doodling a picture,” says Cook.

This article will appear in print under the headline “Let there be games”